I think that you know that I have been interested in the texts of various religions but now tend to read only the wisdom literature in " The Old Testament " ( and I like the old Unitarian Hymn book too for inspiration.) I like to make things simple so I am not about to get caught up in things which unneccessarily complicate my life and I find most religious practices suspect but am curious as to why other people find them important or significant e.g. why do so many proclaim their Atheism in terms of contempt for those who practice a religion - why not be indifferent ?

Infant circumcision however is not a belief but an act upon another without their consent which causes me problems - and you will strongly object to it Marianne but you believe that a rabbi sucks the baby's penis : twelve minutes into this video is an actual circumcision ceremony with the reactions of the audience depicted - so decide for yourself ...

No - I do not spend my days vicariously watching Chassidim etc through Youtube but I have just been in the mood today and Marianne you might like to take a look at the end of this video about chained women i.e. who have not been given a ghet. Without a ghet a woman can not go on to marry legitimately and therefore any future children are pronounced illegitimate and can be badly treated. This kind of a situation - but even more complicated - is what led to my great-grandmother dragging the rabbi out of the shop and driving him out her life by throwing her boots at him in the street : she was so angry with him she marched off to become the only ever Jewish member of The Salvation Army band ... but then she already knew how to blow her own trumpet ... If you are talking more broadly in terms of child abuse then surely religious upbringings more commonly.harm a child's mind than their body ?

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It's not generally the rabbi who did it or does it. There's no need to look at every rabbi and assume he is a pervert. It is the mohel who is a professioal circumciser. Of course, the two jobs may overlap sometimes.

It probably doesn't often happen these days, but there are cases in New York where an extreme fundamentalist sect hangs out. The subject came to light because the children were given herpes.

Not all circumcisions follow the same route. Usually a machine would be used today. At the time of posting, I haven't yet seen your video, but I will look at it.

If anyone still does oral suction at circumcision, it's the Hasidim of New York. You can't see the details on the video, can you? It's the fascinated horror on the faces of the adults that makes you fear the worst.

As kids, we probably think physical suffering is much worse than the mental variety, but apparently, the brain perceives it all as equally bad. A religious upbringing probably does a lot of harm, but there are some nice bits, or people wouldn't come back for more.

For good reasons I now can't stand she who must now be called Della in the interests of discretion, and she is a most awful unreliable liar. But after all, she is probably correct in saying that the Hasidim are seen as an embarrassment by other Jews, and they are not popular with them.

I've seen most of the video now, but it started playing up before it reached the part about the agunahs, the chained women. I'll go back to that later.

It's fascinating that Hasidim were excommunicated and seen as heretics by the Orthodox but to outsiders, they look ultra orthodox. And in some ways they had good ideas. This search for a transcendental experence is so much like Buddhism, but it's without the renunciation of the world that you find in Buddhism.

That you're allowed to enjoy rituals instead of carrying them out in a grim resigned way out of duty, and actually to enjoy food and sex and life, you can't fault it.

The naive exaltation of the rebbes is disturbing though. It's open to abuse. And as for not allowing their children to go to university - they're as bad as the Amish whom they superficially resemble!

When it comes to sex roles, it's a but disturbing again. And this is where we come to the chained women. You have to give it to your great-grandma.She didn't take any shit.

About Bastille Day. I did agree to go to a party on that day, and I know the hostess is very sensitive so I don't want to back out. She is now in Spain and incommunicada. I'm just wondering now if the birthday is 14 July but the party might be on the Saturday.

It might be possible for me to do both, though Abergavenny is badly served by buses. Would it be better to start from Cardiff? Let's dscuss this later in the week.

Dear Marianne - I was knocking up some notes on Helen Maria Williams with a view to a leaflet for the 14th July 2017 - I am trying to use Y Dydd Rhydd to celebrate and make known the suppressed history of 18/19c Republicanism in Wales and she is one of the few women who left a legacy from that period - so even if you do not come I think that you will enjoy reading about her. I do not understand what has happened between yourself and " Della " so. I will not comment besides saying that it has the air of an almost theological hatred ... Did I not make it obvious that the video about chained women is the second one.? I think that it is particularly perverse that extremely orthodox clerics have seized control of the Beth Din and insist upon a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture whereas more liberal clerics are protesting that the law in The Talmud specifically provides against these abuses - e.g. men demanding huge sums of money in exchange for granting a divorce - arguing that they are disregarding their " True " or " Higher Will " and acting upon base motives. The fact is of course that Christianity did not even allow for divorce except for extremely wealthy people because it was being used by governments as a tool for social control with women being treated as an economic resource for the benefit of the landlords who employed their husbands - originally The Aristocrats who had enslaved men as serfs. This is why I find all religious traditions to be suspect that they have had such corruptions fossilsed within them and why I prefer Quakerism with its possibilities for progress.

You know we have been talking an awful lot about traditional religious ideologies but secular religions also ought to be examined e.g. Russian " Communism " i.e. Stalinism provided for divorce and abortion etc but it was hardly a society characterised by rights for women : the laws again were used by the government for its purposes and despite the gloss put on it Russian women were still the property on men who were still the property of The Monocrats in The Kremlin ... and it is much the same now.

I did finally ascertain that there was a second video and that was the one about agunahs. I have watched it now.

I'm still a bit confused about the rationale. Ths subject was mentioned on a law course I did in the 90s. I somehow had the impression that for a male Ashkenazi Jew to have more than one wife is forbidden since the days of Rabbi Falk, but it is not invalid.

So he could prevent his wife marrying again but he would be able to marry himself. Then I thought that perhaps a wife is seen as a possession. But no, it is just that the law says the husband shall give his wife a 'ghet.' It's called 'a bill of divorcement' in the King James Bible.

It doesn't say she shall give him one. But it doesn't specifically say she shan't either. I note that even the nice guys want to bribe or bully the husband into granting a divorce. They don't think that a woman should have the power to give him a divorce.

You might say why should a woman care? She can have a secular divorce. Why doesn't she just tell the Talmudists to go and feck themselves? It might look easy to an outsider but it isn't. Who wants to be ostracised?

I suppose the sticking point is the mamzer status of the children. This is horribly unfair. It's an emotional stoning to death as one agunah put it.

But what I want to ask is isn't the recalcitrant husband also chaining himself to a dead marrriage? Can he remarry himself if he doesn't give in?

My antipathy for Della is not theological. It is personal.

She is Jewish. That is interesting academically, but not the issue.

The direct evidence is lacking but I have strong circumstancial evidence that through trouble making, she effectively set that idiot on us like an attack dog, the one who nearly punched us down the stairs to our deaths the last time we met.

A strict moralist would say I have some responsibility too. Why did I have to make an angry person even angrier, instead of trying to defuse the situation? That is a fair point. Mea culpa.

I don't know if 'hatred' is the emotion I feel, but anger yes; of course,
I'm angry. I'll make a statement to the police tomorrow but just as a reference point in case something else happens. I won't take it further. After tomorrow, I will try to put it behind me.

I heard enough about Wisdom Literature at A Level, but I'm now struggling to remember what it is. Do you mean Ecclesiastes and Job and that sort of thing? And is there any Wisdom literature in the Appocrypha?

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I've consulted again my tatty paperback, 'Daughters of Rachel' by Natalie Rein, which was published in 1980.Taking into account that it is 37 years out of date, it's nevertheless a fascinating read.

Rein says there is no civil marriage or divorce in Israel which is still true. According to Rein, I was right the first time. Implicit in the Halacha is that the woman is the man's property. She said this is why he has the sole right of granting a divorce.

She wrote that the Court of Rabbis can grant or withold a divorce as they see fit, according to the evidence and the religious law. As a woman is legally her husband's property, if he dies without a son, she is inherited by his younger brother.

Some will remember that Henry viii tried to get a divorce on the grounds that some passage in the Old Testament forbade a man to marry his brother's wife. It was pointed out that there is another passage in the Old Testament which actually commands him to do that very thing.

The Old Testament takes it for granted that the woman wants to be inherited. The younger brother can repudiate her but has to submit to a ceremony where she pulls off his sandal and spits in his face.

I remember now reading of a case in 1966 where a man was forced to marry his sister-in-law because as he was a deaf mute, he could not verbally repudiate her. And he was obliged to do this although he was married already. They were divorced the next day!

That the law forced people to take part in this play acting sounds very odd. I have no idea if levirate marriage still has a place in Israel in 2017.

According to Rein if the brother-in-law is a minor she has to wait for him to grow up. If he is in a country to which she has no access - this was written by Rein during the Cold War - she had no power to remarry anyone else.*

Rein said that women are not allowed to testify in the rabbinical court. So if a couple have run a business together, and the wife has done most of the work, she cannot tell the court that fact.

Rein said a man could cohabit with another woman and have a child by her, and that would not affect his standing when it comes to divorce. But a woman cannot even speak to another man in her own house without being branded a 'rebellious wife', and can lose all rights to children, property and financial support.

If she leaves the family home during the divorce proceedings, she loses all her rights. It makes no difference if she has been the victim of abuse. Domestic violence is not usually considered by the rabbinical court to be good grounds for divorce, especially if the husband apologises and promises to mend his ways, often having no intention of doing so.

In the build up to the divorce, the woman is expected to at least passively acquiesce in regular sex. Otherwise, she will be a rebellious wife. Until 1975, if a woman was divorced for adultery, this was stamped on her divorce certificate, and she was forbidden to both her ex husband and her lover. Women might be put on black lists and forbidden to marry, because people with petty grudges, had told the rabbinical court lies about them.

*This was as of 1980. Acccording to Wikipedia, levirate marriage is no longer enforced or even allowed in Israel.Instead, the brother and sister-in-law must go through the ceremony of repudiation.

I have not been able to find out when it was abolished. Levirate marriage is known in other clan based patriarchal societies throughout the world but is in decline as the concept of women's rights has spread even to remote regions.

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Israel has come down hard on recalcitrant husbands since 1980. So husbands may be in prison for refusing their wives a ghet. One rabbi has an ingenious way round a spousal refusal. He says it has Talmudic precedent.

A man may say he does not want to give his wife a ghet. But he does want to, really. It is only his lower self who says the opposite. His higher self knows what he should do, and wants to do it.

Chained women are now worse off in countries like the UK. The husband with the northern accent whose face was pixellated out wanted to show that the husbands are not villains here. But he came across as totally obnoxious.

Because I gave my copy of 'Children of the Ghetto' by Israel Zangwill to Della, I'm not sure I have all the characters' names right, but it has a curious sub narrative. Hannah Jacobs, the London born daughter of Reb Shemuel from Poland is now 19.

Her mother's name is Simcha which means 'rejoicing', but she is more often upbraiding. She moans that in Poland Hannah would now be married. But in this godforsaken land, girls don't even get a fiance until they are 20.

At the breakfast table, she is always nagging Hannah about her unmarried state. Hannah says she doesn't want a husband anyway. Her mother starts wailing that she is 'meshuggah', mad.

Shortly afterwards, Hannah is at a gathering for the redemption of someone's first born son, or it may be an engagement party. In any case, a friend Sam fishes out of his pocket the engagement ring he has just bought for his fiancee who may be called Leah.

He brandishes it tantalisingly, but when Leah extends her finger, he withdraws it teasingly. He says that as a reward for quietly frying fish, he will award it to Hannah Jacobs.

Grabbing Hannah's hand, he slips the ring on her finger, with the words, ''Behold thou art consecrated to me with this ring according to the the law of Moses and Israel'', the line he had been rehearsing for his wedding. There are shouts of laughter.

Hannah extracts the ring from her finger and gives it to Leah. Then one of the guests says, ''I am afrad what you have done is serious. You have married Hannah Jacobs.'' Sam looks at him in astonishment, then bursts out laughing. He says, ''Oh no, old man, you don't take me in like that!''

More laughter follows. The older man says, ''Laugh all you like. You will soon find out I am right. You have pledged yourself to her in front of two witnesses.''

Sam says it was only a joke, and he is already engaged to Leah. The other guy says that the law takes no account of jokes, and the engagement is not relevant as they are both single - or rather they were both single until a few minutes ago.

Everyone is aghast except Simcha who has really cheered up. Somebody runs off for a Talmudic sage. He confirms what the officious guest said.

Leah's mother shouts at Sam, ''You rogue! You thought Leah was only a teacher, but Reb Shemuel would pile you up gold in the hand! But you don't take me in like this!'' ''May this piece of bread choke me if I had the slightest iota of intention!'', protests Sam. He asks if there is no solution.

''Of course there is'', says the Maggid calmly, ''Only one solution but a very broad and simple one. He must give her ghet!''

Sam bursts out laughing again, ''Of course! I divorce her at once. What a lot of fools we are!'' Simcha looks crestfallen but everyone else is relieved and delighted.

Reb Shemuel won't officiate at his own daughter's divorce. That would be indelicate. He refers the case to the Beth Din. But he agrees that while some authorities do take the intention into account, it is much safer to have a proper divorce.

At the Purim ball that weekend, Hannah meets a secular Jew, David Brandon who has been in South Africa. She tells him her husband Sam is dancing with Leah. David can see he is all over Leah. He says he'd like to punch him. He calls Leah 'that fat thing in red.'

Hannah says it doesn't matter. ''I'm going to be divorced from him tomorrow.'' David says, ''Oh now I'm sure you're having me on.'' Hannah laughs and enlightens him but swears him to secrecy.

Hannah and David begin a romance. Eventually, he is in Reb Shemuel's study. He is quite happy to return to his ancestral faith in return for Hannah's hand.

He reveals that he is a cohen although he doesn't have that name. Reb Shemuel's face lights up at once. But then a thought strikes him. He goes grey and says, ''You ...you ...cannot marry Hannah!''

''Why not?'', asks David, ''I thought cohenim were the aristocracy of Israel.''
''That is why'' says the reb; ''A cohen cannot marry a divorced woman.'' It then becomes grim, with David exclaiming, ''Then, Sam has ruined our lives!'' There is no solution.

... Which sort of demonstrates The Principle in Republican Legal Systems which is to not interfere in consenting relationships : The State should not be used to prescribe what kinds of consenting relationships are allowed only what kinds of non-consenting relationwhips are proscribed. ... Otherwise Marianne you will find yourself commanded by The Law to not only be married to an elderly willy-sucking child-abusing cleric but also to love, cherish and obey him etc.

About your last but one post; it sounds strange that a modern state like Israel forces otherwise autonomous adults into compulsory marriages for whimsical and almost playful reasons based on ancient literature, or did until recently.

A recent book on British society in the time of Jane Austen mentions that compulsory marriage for working class adults was known in the UK in the early nineteenth century. It was not the central government but the local worthies who often forced young working men to marry women they had made pregnant.

This was not for reasons of propriety but so that the resultant child would not be a burden on 'the parish.' A local vicar noted in his diary that he had had to officiate at a wedding where the young groom was frog marched up the aisle by parish heavies, cursing, protesting and blaspheming. The vicar recorded his own shocked disapproval that the young man was treating the holy rite with such irreverence.

It's also hard to imagine what it's like to be the dutiful wife of a mohel,who collects his suit from the dry cleaners and irons his shirts so that he will be dressed for the occasion when he sets out with his implements of torture to mutilate four babies on Thursday and then suck their genitals - and the spouse thinks this is normal!

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Now concerning those matters about which you wrote as St Paul would say, I saw a documentary about a young Israeli couple who were going out of the titchy country so they could have a civil wedding. Their objection to a Jewish religious wedding is that it is 'sexist.'

They didn't itemise why they thought so but they were probably right. After all, you can see in the story about Hannah Jacobs that the woman doesn't get to make any vows at all. She is just there, a passive or impassive object.

Whether that is better or worse or just as bad as being required to make obsequious vows is debatable. I think the reason the traditional wedding ceremony we are familiar with in Britain sounds so grovelly is that it was inspired by feudal oaths.

Yet the word 'obey' didn't creep in until after the Reformation. Before that there was a unilateral vow taken by women to be 'bonny and buxom in bed and at board.' Some versions of the Sarum rite have 'bonnaire and buxom in bed and at board.'

I confess I don't quite know what this means. I dread to think!

There was no civil marriage in the UK until 1835. Before that the rites of Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer were compulsory for everyone but Quakers and Jews. That doesn't mean all women abased themselves verbally. They often mumbled something that rhymed with 'obey' such as 'say nay' or even 'betray'!

It is true that Cranmer also introduced the first glimmer of companionate marriage. The preamble about why marriage was ordained of God, mentions 'the mutual society, help and comfort that the one ought to have of the other.'

There was nothing like that before the Reformation. Cranmer, of course had a secret wife, Margaret Ossiander from Germany.

While I understand the horror of his martyrdom in Bloody Mary's reign - ''This hand hath offended so it shall first be burnt!'' - I certainly feel antipathy for him as he also burnt people when he was in power although only in very small numbers.

Even Foxe of Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs' acknowledged feeling uneasy about him. He had a dual status as persecutor and martyr.

It's disturbing to read of how he browbeat and badgered the poor boy, Edward vi, into signing an order allowing some heretical woman called Joan to be burnt. He reduced the boy to tears. How horrible to manipulate a child into taking responsibility for something so vile against the child's own better nature!

Campaigners for children's rights say that 'circumcision' is a euphemism. That is why we should say FGM or MGM instead. No one could make that criticism of the traditional word for circumcision in Welsh.

It is 'enwaediad'. I discussed it with Richard Gillion who comes to our Welsh classes in a certain library in a certain town. Richard is so erudite and such an interresting conversationalist.

I had quite a shock to find out he was a Methodist minister and would soon be leaving us to take up a preaching slot in Bangor. I wondered aloud about the 'waed' part . Did it mean - well - blood? Richard said that yes, it did mean bloodletting.

I said, ''Oh well, it's not pulling any punches, is it? No one could call that a euphemism. Aw...ugh!...baban druan!'' I added, ''I hope this doesn't sound intolerant but I don't think it's a right thing to do at all. But it's not as bad as the thing that happens immediately afterwards.''

Interestingly, although I didn't say what it is, Richard knew immediately.

Incidentally, the Welsh class is held in a open plan foyer where there are tables, chairs and vending machines. We've often brought in birthday cakes and all sorts of other cakes, and pooled our food.

Now some jovial guy in the class has been given an 'awful bollocking' because we've been eating our own food. The tutor took his side and we had a bit of an indignation meeting about it.

The staff have been looking at the CCTV cameras to see if they can catch us eating our own food. There is also a notice up in Welsh about, 'You can't eat your own food here and if you do, you can bugger off.''

Of course, I'm quite traumatised on the subject of being thrown out of public buildings for minor peccadilloes. I loathe long pi-jaws. I didn't know Richard's profession when I recounted the events concerning Della's 'flying monkey' or 'attack dog.'

But when he winced slightly at my contribution and said, ''Throwing oil on the flames?'', I saw his point. It wouldn't have been possible to do the opposite though. The idiot was not in a rational frame of mind. The life coach Richard Grannon would say, ''Do not seek for reason where there is none.''

After taking our side on the food controversy, and telling me my translation was excellent, the tutor went away to attend to another class. I was having a conversation with a comparative novice although one who has made great strides. It was in English, partly for his benefit.

The tutor came back and said in irate tones, ''The local authoirty funds this class so people will have an opportunity to speak Welsh. If you want to speak English, bugger off! You can go and speak it in the street!''

In light of previous experiences, I must have looked shell shocked. ''Only joking, Marianne!'', laughed the tutor, ruffling my hair. If only all tongue lashings in public venues ended like this!

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See the above link for our friend Richard Gillion's translation of an extraordinary hymn by an Ellis Roberts. St Paul said 'Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything.' But Ellis Roberts sees it as a holy thing foreshadowing the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

I did say it was OK for kids to have tattoos and piercings if they were over a certain age, didn't I ? Of course, it is , but you can say these things too glibly.There are individual circumstances to factor into the equation.

Here is a story from 'Invisible Chains' by Lisa Aronson Fontes, which is about coercive relationships. :

'Ramona was just 17 when she walked into 28 year old Tyler's studio for her first tattoo. Within six months she was covered in tattoos and piercings and had begun spending all her time at the studio, answering the phone and handling the appointment schedule. Ramona slept on one of the tattoo tables at night.'

' She dropped out of...school...She tried the drugs Tyler and his friends gave her. Ramona felt as if she had entered a secret and entrancing world.

'She liked being desired by Tyler who initiated a sexual relationship with her
( despite going home to his wife and children every night). Tyler 'worked on' Ramona almost every day, piercing her lips, cheeks, eyebrows and nipples and installing textured metal under her skin so that one arm looked as if it had scales.Essentially Tyler did everything to her teen body that he could in a short space of time.

'Ramona allowed Tyler to hang hooks in her flesh and suspend her - for the intense experience. Tyler explained that suspension was part of a lifestyle, he was her mentor, and she would get better at it over time if she learnt to 'turn her brain off.'

'Ramona became almost unrecognisable to her family and friends during the rare times that they saw her. She was different not just because of the changes in her appearance, but also because she was glum, edgy, nasty, and high much of the time.

'One evening Ramona's mother showed up at the tattoo studio after hours with her siblings. They persuaded Ramona to come home.

The mother left a note telling Tyler that she would press charges against him if he ever contacted her daughter again. Ramona entered into intensive psychotherapy to understand what had happened to her. Tyler had used his position to shape and control a vulnerable young woman.'

Yuck! The suspension sounds like that lovely initiation ceremony that Native Americans on prairies used to have. A young man would be hoisted up by claw like implements embedded in his pectoral muscles , up into the apex of a wigwam just when the sunlight was streamng through.

Although intensely painful, it could be a transcendental experience. It happens to the white captive in the film, 'A Man Called Horse.' You can also find it in the novel 'Centennial' by James A Michener, in the chapter called 'Lame Beaver Meets the Sun.'

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Interesting how these extremely painful degrading deranging ceremonies are always deemed to be beneficial for the victims by the perpetrators of these acts as they entreat their victims to believe that they want their ####s severed, burned and mangled - and those Buddhist child monks are always so mystical etc not unwanted or starving offspring.

That's the worst thing. Alice Miller the psychologist had a book called 'For Your Own Good' which is about how cruelty to children in families and schools is rationalised and reinterpreted as something beneficial. If you believe the propaganda, you will be really mixed up.

Richard Grannon says that in his imaginary gulag, he gets his prisoners up at 3 am, hoses them with ice cold water, shoutng at them that they are anti Communist scum, and he despises them. He beats them with rubber hoses, punctuating his physical onslaughts with insults.

That is awful, but these people still know who they are. Their sense of identity will be all the stronger afterwards and they will gather to share indignation and outrage.

But his friend's imaginary gulag is much worse. She has grown up in a former Soviet Republic, and she knows how these things are done. She also gets her prisoners up in the small hours for hosing with ice cold water. She also beats them with the hose.

But she doesn't tell her prisoners she hates them. She tells them she loves them. She is re-educating them. She is not hosing them down withc ice cold water. She is giving them a wash. The water only feels cold because they are hypersensitive. She is not beating them. She is educating them.

After a few months of this, the prisoners won't know who they are, or what reality is. They'll be really mixed up.

And this is what many or most family systems and religions are like. No, I'm not shearing off your foreskin with no pain relief. I am welcoming you into the covenant of Abraham. It's such a happy time!

No, the mohel is not a paedophile who is about to give you herpes. He's considerately cleaning the wound with his owm saliva. It's a hygienic measure.

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